


one in five billion

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s05e02 Redux II, Episode: s06e15 Arcadia, Episode: s08e13 Per Manum, Episode: s08e14 This is Not Happening, Episode: s10e01 My Struggle, Episode: s10e03 Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster, Episode: s10e05 Babylon, F/M, Fluff, X-Files Wifegate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2018-06-04 13:32:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 48
Words: 16,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6660127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Compilation of X Files tumblr prompts. Credit goes to prompt creators.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "You’re beautiful, you know that?” and/or "Are you ever going to ask the question you came to ask me?"

**Author's Note:**

> these were originally posted to my tumblr, how-i-met-your-mulder.

“You’re beautiful, you know that?“ 

"Mulder, you’re drunk.” But she smiles, smile painted orange by the setting sun, and she swings their joined hands between them. 

“I’m not. And you are. You are beautiful.” He touches the tip of her nose on an impulse. 

She rolls her eyes a little, but she doesn’t stop smiling. He hasn’t seen her this happy since her mother. 

“So,” he starts. “Are you ever going to ask the question you came here to ask me?” It’s been several hours. She is good at procrastinating.

“What makes you think I came here with a question?” she teases. 

“I know you, Scully. You were driving with a purpose.”

“You’re just incredibly distracting,” she says. 

There is silence for a moment, the crickets serving as a background. He’s expecting a _do you want to give us another try, can I move back in_ , but definitely not a “will you marry me”. “Scully!” he says in surprise. 

“Mulder,” she prompts him. “You asked. Eighteen years ago. Would you have preferred I brought a ring?” Her free hand slips into her pocket.

“No! I-I just… you surprised me.” He can still remember the day she left, bags on the porch. He’d asked her not to. 

She seems to deflate a little. “You don’t have to say yes,” she says. “It seems a little… unconventional in our situation.” She pulls her hand out of his.

“No, wait, Scully, wait.” He grabs it again. 

She turns her eyes up to meet his, burning blue eyes in the night. “You’re… all I have left now, Mulder.” Names are left unsaid between them, but they all register in his brain, like a knife. “I think my leaving was for the best, but I’m ready to come back. You’re my family, Mulder.”

He squeezes her hand tightly.

“But we don’t have to get married to make that official,” she adds. “It was just a thought.”

He kisses her, any echoes of trumpets flying free of his brain. “Of course,” he says. “Of course I’ll marry you.”

She smiles quickly and widely, ducking her head, and slips something over his finger. “So you did get a ring,” he says teasingly.

“It was my father’s,” she says. “Bill gave it to me after the funeral.”

He pulls her against him, heart swelling up. “I’ll get you one,” he promises. 

He strokes her hair a little as the last of daylight fades away. He could spend time musing on decades wasted, but there are decades to come. And it seems to him that Scully will be a part of them.

“Oh, yeah,” she says lazily, happily. “I guess I am gonna be Mrs. Spooky now.”


	2. "You can't die. Please don't die"

He can feel her breath against the top of his head. How long, how long until it will slow and inevitably stop.

“You can’t die,” he whispers against her hand. “Please don’t die.”

She is small and frail in her hospital gown, and she doesn’t wake at the sound of his sobs or at his plea. He presses his lips against her hand in some small, desperate, useless act of chivalry, something adopted from fairy tales his sister may or may not have made him read, he can’t quite remember anymore. He doesn’t dare kiss her lips. If not now, not ever. 

If this were a fairy tale, he thinks, she would spring to life magically cured, and they could drive off into the sunset, alien conspiracy be damned. But it isn’t. Cancer or no, his life has never worked that way. He slips his fingers so that they are pressed against her pulsing wrist in a reassurance to himself, that she is not dead yet. 

Later, she’ll tell him that she won’t be dying, at least not any time soon, beaming almost past the breaking point with that Scully smile that is rare but makes his heart soar, and he’ll barely be able to hug her with his shaking hands, his pounding heart, wondering _is this real is this real_. But for now, he sits, choking back tears, as he watches her sleep. 

* * *

“You can’t die. Please don’t die,” she says, cradling him closer. He’d said that to her once before, she thinks. It must’ve worked for her. It needs to work for him.

She gathers him closer and he doesn’t resist, arms flopping over her lap limply. A hand lands on her shoulder. Skinner, or maybe Doggett. They’d tell her it’s not healthy. She doesn’t care.

“Mulder,” she says, choked on tears. “Mulder. Mulder.” He is unresponsive, which is strange because he always has something to say. She rocks him slightly. She has never held him, not like this, not when she wanted to. 

“Please don’t die,” she says again, although she, the skeptic, should know words won’t bring him back. “We’re gonna have a baby, Mulder.” _And you’d be the best father._ “Please. Please.”

“Agent Scully,” Doggett says. “Dana. Dana, please.” She ignores him. She isn’t ready to let him go. She never was, and this isn’t right because he was supposed to come back with a smirk and bad jokes and a promise not to leave. He was supposed to be a father. He’d make jokes about it on a bench in Pennsylvania. _The Mulder family passes genetic muster._ He must’ve wanted it. He is supposed to be her constant, her touchstone. 

And eventually, he will come back, and he will make bad jokes and smirk at her (and she’ll think briefly _I want to kill him_ , and immediately fall into a sense of familiarity despite the inward grimace at the words), and it’ll come together even as it falls apart, because that is how it’s always been for them. They only live half of a life, getting what they wanted only to have it taken away, happiness that tastes salty like tears. 

But now, she whispers it again. “Please don’t die.” And when they take him out of her arms, she bites down hard on a sob.


	3. Mulder calls Scully baby

She’d kicked him out of the bedroom, so what is he doing back? She’s not sure. She thinks maybe she asked him. Scully’s not sure when her composure crumbled, she knows only that it did and that she went downstairs to find Mulder on the couch. He’d looked up at her with large eyes, saying, “This couch is really uncomfortable, Scully. There’s this one spring bearing into my back.” Their fingers brush under the covers. They must be brave to sleep in a dead couple’s room. 

“Hey, baby?” Mulder says sleepily.

Scully freezes under the heavy blanket. (It’s still February. It’s cold.) She forces any surprise or tension out of her voice as she asks, “What happened to honey bunch?”

“Nothing. Uh, sorry. Scully. Laura.”

“Mulder, they’re not listening to us _in bed_.” In bed. Together. Come on, Laura, we’re married now.

“Yeah. Um.”

Scully props herself up on one elbow. “So, where’d the ‘baby’ thing come from?”

“Uh, it sounds better than honey bunch?” He’s embarrassed. She considers the affectionate nickname seriously. She hasn’t been called ‘baby’ since she was a little girl, a rare occurrence via her mother. Daniel and Jack weren’t very “terms of endearment” men. Mulder had only ever called her by her last name.

She thinks she likes it.

“Okay,” she says, lying her head down on the pillow. “Baby.”

He’s surprised. “Scully?” 

“Go to sleep, Mulder. You’ll need it if you want to test out your theory tomorrow. What does it involve, anyway?”

“Oh,” he says. “A, uh, truly tacky pink flamingo.”

She screws her eyes shut, and smiles.


	4. “I was so alone… and then I met you.”

“I was so alone… and then I met you.” 

Scully lifts her head from the end of the couch. “Who are you talking to, Mulder?” she says with a sleepy smile. “Me or William?”

He bounces their small child as he replies. “Both of you. I think it applies to both of you, anyway.” He’s staring at William with huge eyes, with an almost childlike wonder, like he still can’t believe it. “I mean… I was quite literally alone before I met you, Scully.”

“Mmm.” She moves closer, pulling a blanket around the three of them. “Office get lonely?”

“And cold like you wouldn’t believe.”

Scully smiles, and reaches out to caress William’s head. He gurgles happily and tugs on a strand of her hair.

“But with Will…” he continues.

William lets out a screeching laugh as she absently tickles him, and Mulder gives him a mock stern look. “I’m trying to say something meaningful here, son,” he says.

“Sorry,” Scully says, kissing Mulder on the cheek before settling against his shoulder. She would attribute her overall affectionateness to either fatigue or the giddiness of new parenthood.

“I guess I felt alone in more of an inner sense before he was born,” he says. “You know. With everything that happened.”

She grimaces a little, and grabs his sleeve. “I know.”

He addresses William fully now. “But having you helped a lot,” he tells the boy seriously. “You gave me more reasons to be happy. You gave me an excuse to shack up with your mother.”

“Ha ha.”

“And you both gave me something I didn’t think I’d have again. A family.”

She smiles into his shoulder. “Look at you, Mulder. You’ve gone soft.”

“Yeah,” he says, as William catches one of his fingers and starts to teeth on it. They watch their son with that tempered curiosity of new parents. “Being a father will do that to you, I guess.”


	5. “Have you lost your damn mind!?”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> casefile source: http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDevil%2527s_Tramping_Ground&t=OWQ4NzMxYzUyZWUxNTFkNDU3ZTRmZDRiNDY3MDQyOTM2MDc4NDQ5OSxhQThhT1lOMQ%3D%3D

She really tries not to be too mad at him. But this… “Mulder,” she says. “Have you lost your damn _mind_!?”

He looks hurt, slide flicker in his hand, puppy dog eyes staring down at her. “What, Scully?”

“The _Devil’s Tramping Ground_ ,” she says with emphasis.

He says nothing. Scully sighs and continues. “It’s a circle in the woods of North Carolina where nothing grows and anything left there overnight will be outside of the circle by the next morning, correct?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t see a case there, Mulder. I see another reason for the FBI to threaten to shut us down.”

“I told you,” he says patiently. “Three boys decided to camp out there overnight. Two of them woke up to find that the third had vanished without a trace.” 

“He - he could’ve run off!”

“And left all his stuff at the site?”

Scully folds her arms. “There could be about a thousand other plausible explanations, Mulder. It could be a normal kidnapping.”

“It could. But it _is_ an X File.” Mulder raises an eyebrow suggestively and steps closer to her. 

“Mulder,” Scully says, attempting to rationalize it out with him, tempting as the idea is. She really, really doesn’t want to go back to North Carolina. They have never had good luck in North Carolina. “Someone is bound to notice if we keep leaving one of our hotel rooms.”

“We won’t be in a hotel,” he says, tracing her jawline with his index finger. “We’ll be camping a the site, to see if any other suspicious activity happens.”

“ _Mulder_ ,” Scully groans. As a kid, she used to really enjoy being outdoors, the woods. This job has made her hate it. 

“ _Scully_ ,” Mulder mimics. “Think about it. We’ll be all alone in the woods.” He steps closer, leaning down to kiss her.

She lets out a sigh of defeat and kisses him back. She was going to say yes anyway, she reminds herself. “As long as I don’t have to sing anything,” she says, and his responding grin is worth it. 


	6. “Marry me?” and “I thought you were dead.”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is Not Happening AU.

She pulls the man through the small crowd by his hand, pushing aside paramedics. “Stop!” she snaps to the men easing Mulder’s body onto a stretcher. 

“Agent Scully…” Doggett starts to say, eyeing Jeremiah Smith suspiciously.

“I have to try!” Scully says firmly. She isn’t far from hysteria, she’s sure, but she does have to try. She addresses Jeremiah. “Please.” 

The man nods at her and kneels besides Mulder’s broken body. She presses her fingers against her mouth and says a little prayer silently. Losing Mulder made her lose all faith in God, but now she feels like she needs it back. 

Smith stands and turns to look at her. _Oh God, it didn’t work,_ she thinks.

There’s a sound, a cough, from the ground. And then his raspy voice: “Scully?”

“Oh, my god,” Reyes gasps from somewhere behind her.

Scully can’t get to him fast enough. She falls on her knees beside him, hands going to his neck to feel his pulse. (In case she is hallucinating.) Mulder’s eyes are open and staring at her. He is breathing. 

“Mulder,” she gasps, pulling him against her. “I thought you were dead.”

He buries his head limply against her neck. “I think I was.”

Scully holds up, looks up at the man standing above him. “Thank you,” she whispers.

Jeremiah Smith nods, and walks off into the woods. Skinner is staring at them, mouth agape. Reyes has both hands over her mouth, looking like she’s just witnessed a miracle - which, technically, she has. Doggett looks a little surprised, but not as much as Scully would’ve expected. She remembers something he told her about a recent case, the healing man. 

She ignores them all and buries her tear-stained face against Mulder’s head, focusing on the rattle of his hot breath against her neck, the fact that he’s breathing and alive in her arms. She never thought she’d see him again. 

* * *

Hours later, Fox Mulder is declared to be alive and of sound mind. Scully stands outside his hospital room and thanks Doggett for helping her find him. “I’m very happy for you,” he tells her. “And, hey, hopefully we'll  be joined by Mulder soon in the X Files office,” he adds.

“Two skeptics? He’ll be horrified,” Scully says, smiling widely at the thought. Working with Mulder again. She’s missed him too much through every case, a gaping hole, turning to him to present her theory proudly only to find him gone.

“Well, now, I wouldn’t call you a skeptic.” Doggett pats her hand. “Good night, Agent Scully.”

Once he’s gone, Scully enters Mulder’s room, welcoming the jump of her stomach when she sees him. It’s been so long. Her hand goes back to it’s familiar spot at her abdomen. 

Mulder smiles at her from his bed. “You been making friends in my absence, Scully?”

She moves to sit next to his bed and takes his hand. “You could say that,” she says, caressing his thumb with her own. “How do you feel?”

“Not great, but a hell of a lot better than I would be.” His eyes search her face. “Did Jeremiah Smith…”

“He’d been healing abductees,” Scully says. “After we found you, I went up to the house and brought him back to heal you.”

His eyes widen, and he smiles up at her, squeezing her hand. She squeezes back gratefully, overcome with all these emotions she hasn’t felt in months. The baby kicks, and she smiles in spite of herself. “Mulder, I have something I need to tell you,” she says softly. 

His eyebrows raise at the seriousness of her tone. “What is it? Scully, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she assures. “Do you remember before you were taken… how I was sick, in Bellefleur?” His brow furrows with familiar worry, but he nods. “Well, it turns out that I was - I _am_ \- pregnant.”

Mulder stares up at her with some sort of wonder. “You’re pregnant?” She nods, blinking back tears. “That’s - Scully, that’s great!” He laughs a little. “I mean - it’s mine, right?”

Scully laughs, grabs his hand and kisses it. “Yes, you idiot,” she says. “We’re going to be parents.”

“That’s… that’s - I can’t believe it,” he says, sounding dazed.

“You believe in everything,” she teases. She is awash with familiarity that makes her want to laugh and sob at the same time. “Here.” She guides his hand from her mouth to her abdomen, pressing it there just as the baby kicks again.

He gasps, just a little, and leans back against the pillows. Scully smiles. She’s smiled more in the past few minutes then she has in the past few months. “I love you,” she whispers. “I love you. I should’ve said it a long time ago.”

They sit like this for a long time, their child moving beneath their hands. “Hey, Scully?” Mulder says finally, sounding more tired than she’s ever heard him.

She’s half asleep, and the sound of his voice scares her for a minute before she remembers. “Yes?”

“Marry me?” 

Her eyes fly open, and she stares at him. “Mulder?”

“I just… I thought it might be a good idea,” he mutters sheepishly. “I missed you, Scully. A lot. And now…”

“Yes,” she whispers. She doesn’t want to leave him, not ever, so marriage sounds as good a choice as any.

“What?” he asks, surprised.

“Yes,” she whispers again, burying her head against his shoulder.

His nose presses against her hair as he whispers, “Anybody miss me?”

She laughs, blinking back more tears. They’re here. They’re alive. And they’re going to have a baby. 

“I love you,” he whispers.

They sleep.


	7. “I think I’m in love with you and I’m terrified.”

He turns the badge over and over in his hands. He is Special Agent Fox Mulder again, something he never thought he’d come back from. His partner sits in the driver’s seat. She’s just his partner again, nothing else. 

“Nice to be back, isn’t it?” Scully says.

Mulder doesn’t answer. It is too hard to remember all the consequences of going back. In the last fourteen years, the only thing Scully’s suffered from is heartbreak. And now… who knows? 

“I think it could be good for you,” she says quietly. “Get you out of the house. It could be good for… us.”

There isn’t an us anymore, and it was her decision. He keeps quiet, simply from a lack of words. 

“I think I’m in love with you…” Scully starts.

“…and I’m terrified,” he blurts.

“Mulder…”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t want to… I’ve missed you, Scully.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” she whispers.

“But now that this is all…” He shudders, remembering. “They’ve already given you alien DNA. Who knows what they’d do now?”

Silence for a time. He’s barely even seen her in the last few months, much less talked to her like this. He’s nervous around her, like in the days of their early partnership. Nervous for her, nervous about her. She thinks she’s in love with him? 

“Mulder, after all these years, I certainly understand the risks of coming back,” she says. “I think this is something we both need.”

“But in what way? So we can be the people we used to be? It doesn’t work that way, Scully. And besides that, maybe I don’t want that life for you anymore.”

“Maybe I want it,” Scully says fiercely. “Maybe I do want the old days back. Maybe I want the old you back. The old me back.”

In his mind, she hasn’t changed a bit. More hardened, more tired, sure. But still the same Scully underneath it all. But himself, he wonders about. Is he past the point of being the same person. 

“I’ve missed you,” she repeats. “I only left because I felt like I had to. I need to come home. And I’m willing to wait until you’re ready, and I’m willing to take risks so we can get to that place.” She reaches down and places her hand over his. 

“I don’t know if I’m ready,” he says honestly. 

“We;ll get there. We always do.”

“Okay,” he says, relishing the feel of her cool hands over his. (He’s in love with her, too, to be fair.)

She drops him off at their house and kisses his cheek when she stops the car. “See you tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll come pick you up.”

“Scully, that’s out of your way,” he protests.

“Don’t care.” She kisses him, on the mouth this time, and for a second, it feels like nothing has changed. Maybe it hasn’t, and they can fall right back into place, like pieces of a puzzle, watch the pages turns backwards, build themselves a time machine. Maybe she’s right and this is exactly what they need.


	8. “I need you to pretend we’re dating…”, “It’s only one night, we’ll just share the bed.”, and “Don’t panic but I think we might have accidentally gotten married…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a casefile set in s6, so it gets a little dark in places, but nothing too bad, i think

“What was the dream about?” he asks in a low voice.

Her mouth is pressed against the hollow of his throat, her words pressed against his skin like a tattoo. “It was here,“ she says. “In this hotel, maybe even in this room. And there was a couple who were murdered. Stabbed.” She swallows. “It was vivid,” she breathes. “Blood smeared everywhere. The sheets were soaked. Like… like the dreams you told me about.”

_I need you to pretend we’re dating,_ he’d said by way of introduction to this case. _Are you saying we’re going undercover?_ she’d replied. 

The case had been fairly straightforward, yet enough to catch the X FIles unit’s attention. A series of disappearances, couples who left their rooms at an old hotel out in the hills of West Virginia without a trace. Their luggage and cars were always gone, making it seem like they just left without paying. They haven’t been heard from by family or friends since. But out of the five disappearances - “All in the same hotel, five times, doesn’t that seem unusual, Scully?” - there had been one that was different. It had been two couples staying together and the hotel, and the couple who hadn’t disappeared had been surprised that the other ones had. “The wife said her friend claimed to have had dreams,” he says. “Dreams about past victims, being stabbed in the bed.” A dream very similar to the one Scully just had. 

“Okay,” Scully had said then. “It’s definitely a case, and could even be an X File, I’ll give you that. But why do we have to go undercover as a dating couple?”

“Because,” Mulder explained. “The only people who have disappeared have _been_ couples. Technically, there’s no evidence of foul play, so we can’t conduct an obvious investigation. And I’d feel better about this case if we were in the same room.”

So, here they are, a seemingly oblivious married couple. (The woman at the front desk had called them Mr. and Mrs. Bruin, and Mulder hand’t bothered to correct them. “Don’t panic but I think we might have accidentally gotten married,” he’d whispered in her ear, sending shivers down her spine.) And there was only one bed. (“It’s only one night, we’ll just share the bed,” she’d said with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. Especially not now. She’d woken up from the nightmare wrapped in his embrace, and it didn’t exactly look like she was going to be rolling away anytime soon. It’s strange, but no unfamiliar, to share a bed with him, elevated pulse, and the unfamiliar of a warm body next to her, not touching but there.)

“Are you feeling very psychic, Scully?”

She moves back a little to look at him - discussing cases in bed is a new one, even for them. “I dunno,” she says. “I mean, do we know that the dreams are connected? Not necessarily.” 

“You’re sure it was this hotel?”

“Yes.” Of that she is certain. “It looked exactly the same.”

“Are your dreams usually that vivid?” Mulder shrugs, and the mattress shifts as he sits up beside her. “Look, I’m not saying that it couldn’t be a coincidence. But it sounds an awful lot like the dreams reported in the Mitchell disappearance. Very similar accounts.”

“That is one explanation,” Scully says. It makes the most sense, really, that the dreams could be connected, although she hates to admit it.

He smirks at her, hair rumpled by sleep. “You think I’m right?”

“I said it was a possibility,” she points out, swinging her legs out of bed. She is still shaken up, and her head is throbbing. “I’m going down to the lobby, see if I can get some tea,” she says, pulling on shoes. “I’ll be back in a minute. And I’ll keep an eye out for anything suspicious - we’re not the only couple in this hotel.”

“So we’re a couple now, huh,” Mulder teases. “Be careful!” he adds as the door slams shut behind her.

* * *

It’s practically guaranteed at this point, although Scully wishes she’d thought to bring her gun. The maid who she ran into in the hall holding a knife shoves her into the hotel room. “Scully!” Mulder says, startled, catching her as she stumbles into him. He keeps his arms wrapped around her as she moves upright.

“I mean, you two certainly weren’t the intended target, but you’ll serve my purposes, I suppose,” the maid says. “Get into the closet.”

Mulder talks over her shoulder as he essentially hugs her. (She’d say something, but now’s not the time to get into an argument.) “Listen.. ma’am…” he starts. “I have money…”

“Don’t give me any of that. Get in the closet, now. If you make any noise, I’ll make your death slow.” The maid points at the small room with the tip of her knife.

Scully tries to move away as they head into the closet, but for whatever reason, Mulder keeps a hold of her as they are shut in the dark space. “Mulder,” she says after the door to the room closes, as calmly as she can under the circumstances. “I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t think we need to keep up the pretense of a married couple. Revealing ourselves as FBI agents could help out cause, actually…”

“Scully, I’m trying to hide my gun.”

“What?” She tries to shift positions, and feels the scrape of something metal against her ribcage.

“I stuffed it under my shirt after you left,” he says. “If you stay here, she can’t see it.”

“Oh,” she says. “That was… smart.”

“It happens,” Mulder teases. “I think we can get out of this one. It’s knife against gun, unless she finds yours.”

“You can’t get to it without letting go of me,” she replies in a whisper. “I’ll get the gun.”

Mulder smiles a little, and kisses the top of her head. “In case we don’t get out of this one, I’m sorry I dragged you into it.”

Scully leans her forehead against his shoulder. “You never drag me. I always come willingly.”

“Yeah, but…” he starts. 

The door to the room swings open again. Scully moves her hand beneath Mulder’s shirt, curls her hand around the gun.

As the door swings open, flooding the closet with gray light, Scully whips her gun around and aims it. “Drop the knife and put your hands in the air.”

The maid blinks at them in surprise. “ _Do it_ ,” she says forcefully. “Now.”

The blade drops to the ground. Mulder moves past the woman, probably going for Scully’s other gun. “Call the cops,” Scully says. “I assume you murdered the five couples who have disappeared?” she addresses the woman. “Stabbing? In the hotel bed?”

* * *

By morning, Rebecca and George Bruin have revealed their status at FBI agents, the maid - Rachel Fitzgerald - has been arrested, there have been ten bodies discovered buried out back, and the hotel staff is being questioned. Scully hangs up her cell phone and pulls her jacket tighter around her as Mulder approaches. “Hi, sweetie,” he says jokingly.

Scully smirks, taps her foot with his. “Come up with a new name.”

“What?”

“That was Skinner on the phone,” she says. “He approved of our work on this case, exposing foul play in the deaths of ten people… and he has another undercover case for us, based on our success in this case. In Arcadia Falls, a neighborhood in California.”

Mulder raises an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me.”

Scully shrugs. Some small part of her is excited, actually. “Looks like we accidentally got married again,” she says, tapping him on the arm.

Mulder grins. “Okay, not sweetie. What do you think of honeybunch?”


	9. i love yous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the first time Mulder says I love you to Scully vs the first time Scully says it to Mulder

**_his_ **

“I love you,” he says from a hospital bed, and it comes easier than he ever could’ve imagined, and it feels like letting loose a held breath, like a weight’s been released, and like he can clear his conscience now. It’s _easy_. All of a sudden, he’s more ready than anything for this to start. It never seemed like the right time before, not when she was mourning, or dying, or when it was all still new, and always the threat of her being used against him was lingering, and he couldn’t understand his feelings half the time, couldn’t  And he’d never known if she’d felt the same way. But she was going to kiss him back, he reminds himself. Who knew that something like traveling through time with a 1930′s imitation of Scully would be the thing to convince him and not the hundreds of thousands of times they’d almost lost each other. But still, he loves her and it’s more obvious than it’s ever been. It is a screaming, gaping cavern. He loves her. 

“Oh, brother,” she says, and walks away. 

It’s not going to happen, that becomes clear fast. They are not going to have That Defining Moment, no kiss in the rain or long speech confessing their love. They’ve never fit that kind of norm, anyway. And he’s lived without her for years, always waiting. He can wait a little longer. She is safe and alive.

And, well, things keep happening to suggest that their relationship might be changing. They almost end up in a lover’s pact. The entire damn town of Kroner seems to think that they are together - which isn’t a new thing, but it’s never happened multiple times in one case. And Scully touches him a little longer now. She falls asleep on his shoulder in the still-dark hours of Christmas morning. She closes the distance between them in a motel bed in her sleep and wakes up curled against him. They never talk about it the way they never talk about anything - silence is their strong suit. But still, he finds it easier to think it. _I love you_ , he mouths to her sleeping form in a hospital bed, when she’s almost died again. He almost says it to keep up the charade in Arcadia Falls. The residents seem more concerned with whether or not they’re going to break the rules then the status of their “marriage”, but it would be as easy to say it as it is for his arm to come up around her shoulders. _You’re whipped_ , Langly told him at one point. _He was right,_ Mulder thinks helplessly.

“Agent Scully is already in love,” Padgett says. He doesn’t try to interpret it, but he can’t stop thinking it when he thinks he may have lost her. There are _I love yous_ in the crack of a baseball bat, and _I love yous_ when he holds out his hand for hers and their fingers slide together like they have a thousand times. They almost die a few more times. It happens - one kiss, and then more following it. She stays at his house after Pfaster. He whispers, “I love you” into her hair as she falls apart. He doesn’t know if she hears him, but she leaves a change of clothes at his house.

He starts saying it out loud, but only when she can’t hear. Part of him is scared to say it, part of him knows that they don’t need to. She holds him after his mother dies, and after he loses his sister again, and murmurs comforting things into his hair. They laugh more loudly than they ever have before, hold hands unexpectedly. “It all feels like a great secret, Scully,” he tells her. (She replies that Skinner, at the least, sees right through them.) “I love you, Scully,” Garry Shandling says for him. Hollywood portrays their love story wrong. Scully promises him she wouldn’t trade him for Skinner or for a Hollywood love story. 

He kisses her before he goes to Oregon. It is a long one, like he thinks he’ll never see her again. Her hands are still curled around his jacket when he pulls back, and she leans into him for a hug. “I love you,” he tells her. 

Scully smiles at him and kisses his cheek. She still looks a little sick, and he knows he’s going to call her as soon as she gets off of the plane to check on her. She straightens his tie for him, the silk winding through her fingers as she tells him, “I’ll see you soon.”

**_hers_ **

She never told him, and it wasn’t even a conscious decision on her part, but she still curses herself mercilessly. _goddamn it fuck you he needs to know. he_ needs _to know._

She was always going to find him but this realization drives her. He needs to know. Needs to know how much she needs him, how he is what keeps her going, what has kept her going for the longest time, kept her walking into that basement office every morning. He makes her laugh. He makes her forget about things with his steady touch and goopy looks. 

She dislikes the way Doggett refers to their relationship, or the rumor of her relationship - as if it was nothing more than an affair, as if they didn’t have years and years of history between them, the weight of fear that they wouldn’t have each other anymore. She sleeps holding his shirt like a security blanket, and doesn’t think about the baby - _their_ baby - until it becomes clear that he won’t be back soon and she is going to have to deal with at least some of this by herself. It doesn’t feel right to think about the baby, because he should be here - they should be discussing their next move and sheepishly telling her mother, discussing names and sending Mulder out at random hours of the night to satisfy cravings _I Love Lucy_ style. Every time she thinks about the baby, she thinks about him, the gaping wound that he left.

She thinks about him on cases, thinks about the theories he would have, imagines him beside her instead of Doggett. Doggett - he’s not a replacement for Mulder, he’s nothing like Mulder, but it feels that way sometimes. Seven years, and it should be him on these cases with her, and she should be in Doggett’s place, providing steady scientific fact and theories, and keeping Mulder from getting too close to the edge. She likes to think he’d be proud of her new believer attitude (” _Scully_ ,” he’d said with wonder when she suggested spontaneous human combustion, like she’d given him the fucking moon), but she doesn’t know what it will be like when he gets back ~~(if he gets back)~~. Will they even still be working cases when he gets back, or will they be parents? There’s unanswered questions, and this sense of terror that never leaves her, keeps her up at night. And then he’s found. 

It gets harder. The curses aimed at herself in her head grow louder, and she cries in front of her partner and doesn’t care (because who fucking cares what they think of her now), and practices telling her child _your daddy’s dead_ in a steady voice. She needs him like air. You never think about needing air until you can’t breathe, and she can’t breathe. 

He comes back, and she can breathe again.

She almost tells him. He says it to her again on a hospital bed - mouths it, really, but it resonates, reverberates through her. But. They are different. She is a mother, and he is traumatized. It is not the same. 

It comes close, within reaching distance of being _them_ again because they are parents and their son looks like him (he doesn’t see it, but it’s there), and she loves him so much it hurts. She comes close to telling him - close, close, so _fucking_ close - and he tells her he is in danger, and she pushes him away with both hands. She has to, she can’t lose him again. _If he knows, he won’t go,_ she rationalizes with herself, the way she always has, and she hates it, hates the logical side of her with a burning passion. 

“I love him,” she tells Reyes one night. 

“I figured,” she says. “Devotion like that and a baby don’t usually come out of a friendship.”

“You’re the first person I’ve told,” she replies - calm, calm, like she won’t come apart. “Not even him.”

Months later, she sees him again in a jail cell, without her son, and he kisses her in a way that makes her feel alive again. They hit the ground running this time, and she doesn’t look back because it was never a question, she is leaving nothing behind. 

Scully considers it all, the messy string of choices that led to them getting here, in a hotel room stripped of parenthood and their old lives. He blames himself; she blames herself. They both know better. She knows that it’s going to be hard from here on out - and she doesn’t care. They have each other again, finally. Back in the car, but they will never live something approaching a normal life.

She tries to forget. She watches him drive with her knees pulled up to her chest - he drives with one hand, the other resting on the console, and with a casualness she could never pull off, and she just grabs his hand and blurts it out. “I love you.”

He turns to look at her, eyes wide and reflecting the sinking sun. Scully near sobs, brings his hand to her mouth and says, “I love you so much.” _And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

He smiles. “Love you, too.”


	10. MSR proposal

The pain is almost unbelievable, and even though she’s chastising herself that she’s a _doctor_ and that this is all _normal_ , she can’t wait for it all to be over.

“Do they know how much longer?” Mulder asks, curling his fingers around hers. She squeezes back tightly, a little embarrassed by her desperation.

“I don’t know, I think more dilation needs to occur,” she says, wincing. “Distractions would be welcome, Mulder. I’ll even let you talk about that X File.”

“The one with the disappearances from the locked rooms?”

“That’s the one,” she says, strangling his fingers in her grasp as another contraction hits. “Start talking, Mulder, this is a once in a lifetime chance.”

“Actually, I wanted to talk about something else,” he says, and stops as she starts to groan with pain.

“Go on,” she mutters through clenched teeth. “Distractions, remember?” 

“Okay, um…” he continues nervously. “I guess I’m coming home with you two after this is all over.”

“Of course, you idiot,” she groans through the contraction. 

“And I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, about… you, and everything we’ve been through together, and the baby, and I was just wondering if you wanted to make this a little more permanent.”

Scully collapses against the pillows, loosening her grip on Mulder’s hand, and looks over at him incredously. “Are you proposing?”

“Sorry I don’t have a ring,” he says sheepishly, holding up his free hand to prove it.

“Are you doing this because of my mother?” she asks. 

“No, I’m doing it because of you.”

“You know I don’t mind that we’re not married,” she says.

“I just thought it might be a good idea,” he says. “This way, I can avoid the age-old question of ‘why are you and Mommy not married?’ And I love you, and I love our child. It seems right.” Mulder smiles, and squeezes her hand again. “But it’s okay if you don’t want to. I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”

She thinks again of the scene at the airport before he’d left for Oregon. She hadn’t let go of his hand. “Don’t go,” she’d said. Pregnancy hormones. But he hadn’t gone, for what seemed like the first time in their relationship, and he hadn’t left since. He’d been so happy when they found out about the baby.

“You know, official FBI policy prohibits marital attachment between partners,” she says, and smiles - a pretty weak one, considering all the pain, but he understands.

“What with all the rules we break, I don’t think it’ll matter,” he says, with a sense of wonder, like he didn’t expect her to agree. 

“Dana?” They both look over at the doctor, who is smiling. “It’s time.”

Scully turns to face Mulder. “You ready?”

He kisses her forehead. “Let’s get it on, honey.”


	11. “I’m not good with words.”

_December, 1999_

Seeing each other in the evenings after work has become more and more plausible since he’s gotten out of the hospital. He sounds surprised when she calls to ask him over - they haven’t spoken outside of the office since the elevator. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t want to come off wrong, I just… thought you were upset with me.” 

There’s a lot of possible responses to this, but she doesn’t bother with them. Instead, she thinks of his smile when he talked to her daughter, of his hand on her cheek and his mouth against her forehead, of the possibility of their child. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” she says. “It’s probably, um, better to do it in person.” 

“Sure!”  His reply is overeager, almost. “I’ll be right over. Want me to bring anything?”

Is _just you_ too needy? Probably, despite the very personal request she is about to make. “No, I’m fine, thank you.”

She rehearses the speech she came up with on the way home in her head. It all sounds silly now, words tangling into knots in her mouth. She pushes away thoughts of him saying no, thoughts of him saying yes but not being there the way she wants him to. (It seems probable that he would say no, how could they continue on the X Files with a child to take care of, maybe if they lived together and he stayed on the job and she took a teaching position… but, no, she wouldn’t want to send her child’s father out alone like that, and it’s a little premature to be considering this, but she’s been thinking about it for a while now, almost since she went into remission, she’s just been scared, it’s the scariest thing in the world…) 

The doorbell jars her from her thoughts. Her hands shake a little as she pulls the door open. Mulder is smiling nervously on the other end. “Hey, Scully.” 

“Come in,” she says awkwardly. “Please.”

“Sure.” He peels his coat off as he moves towards her couch. She takes it from him and takes it to the coat rack, mostly for an excuse to calm her nerves. Her pulse is jumpy, erratic, and it seems insane that she’s this nervous, after everything they’ve been through. Scully sits facing him in a chair, smoothing the upholstery nervously before resting her hands on her knees. 

“Oh, how did your appointment go?” he asks. 

“Good, it was… good.” She clears her throat. “They said there was a good chance to get me pregnant. And that we could probably start soon.”

Something like fear flickers across his face before he smiles. “That’s great, Scully.” His hand spans the space between them and covers hers on her knee. “I’m happy for you,” he adds softly. There is something of regret coating his tone, regret that he’s trying to hide. 

She almost smiles. “Actually, that was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He nods. He is expecting her to tell him that she is leaving, and she doubts he will try to kiss her this time, no matter how much she wants him to.

She clears her throat again. “I’m not good with words,” she starts uneasily. “But, uh.” She turns her hand under his so that their palms are touching, and interlaces her fingers with his. “I was wondering if you would consider being the father.” 

He’s shocked; that much is clear. He doesn’t pull his hand away, but he stares at her in silence, mouth half-open. “Scully, you, uh…” he says finally. “You want me to be the father of your child?”

_You’re the only logical choice. You’re the only one I considered, the only one I’d want to spend the rest of my life with. I love you. I…_  “Yes.”

He blinks a few times, staring at her with shock. Scully can feel the sweat pooling on her palm, and for a second, she regrets ever bringing this up. Her stomach twists. “I’m, uh… I’m gonna need some time to think about this.”

She blinks hard; what else did she expect? “I understand.” 

“No, Scully, it’s not…” He squeezes her hand. “It’s not a bad- I’m not looking for the best way to let you down. I promise. It’s just… a lot to process.”

“No, I understand, Mulder, really, it’s… not a simple request.” She tries to smile. “Take all the time you need.” 

He leans forward to press a kiss to her forehead. Scully closes her eyes under the pressure of it, tries not to fall apart or tether him to her and not let go. “I’d better head out,” he says quietly. “I’ll see you Monday?”

“Of course.” Thank God she picked a Friday; she doesn’t know how she would face him tomorrow. 

She retrieves his coat from the coat rack, despite his attempts to get it himself, and walks him to the door. He shrugs it on before pulling the door open and stepping out of the apartment. He turns back like an afterthought. “Scully?”

Her hand clenches around the door. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

As soon as the door is closed, she rests her forehead against the wall and tries not to picture a baby with his eyes. 


	12. "That's why I love you."

The nearest hotel is almost an hour out of town. When the manager tries to protest about checkout times, Mulder flashes his badge and he shuts up immediately. “Will you drive?” he asks Scully when they get to the car.

She blinks. “Mulder, are you sick?”

He shrugs. “You’ve driven before. Were you expecting a little feet joke?”

“Partially, yes,” she says wryly, climbing into the driver’s seat and adjusting it. Mulder climbs into the passenger seat and pulls out his phone, typing _werelizard_ into the Google search bar. She rolls her eyes. 

By the time they get to the new hotel, Mulder has scrolled through a variety of blogs and some more-than-suspicious looking pictures. Scully rolls her eyes and leaves him in the car while she goes to check in. She taps on his window when she returns. “There’s only one room. I went ahead and rented it.” 

He looks up from the glow of the screen in surprise. “Scully, are you sure?”

She feels like rolling her eyes, and wonders if wearing his shirt wasn’t obvious enough. Then again, it wasn’t a shirt he’d worn very much. She’d pulled it from the dirty clothes pile and tucked it into her suitcase the night she left in the mindset that it would still smell like him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mulder. Come on, it’s late.” 

There’s two beds in the suite, one of which she has no intention of using. She changes into his old Knicks shirt in the bathroom, and sits beside him on one of the beds when she comes out. Mulder’s still absorbed in his phone, tapping manically. “Look, Scully, this blog of paranormal sightings claimed they saw a human turn into a lizard once,” he says, flashing the screen at her.

She smiles. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, Mulder.” 

“There’s a picture, see?” He enlarges a photo of a teenage boy who’s legs are partially covered in green scales. 

“Haven’t you heard of Photoshop, Mulder?”

“This looks authentic,” he insists, jabbing at the screen with one finger. 

If she closes her eyes, she could almost pretend they’re back in the basement, arguing over dusty old files with the rest of their life ahead of them. “An entry on an obscure paranormal sighting blog is hardly plausible documentation.”

“There’s multiple other documentation, I might add. I have files on this type of case, Scully, files going back to the sixties,” Mulder says smugly.

“Were the witnesses on those cases as unreliable as the ones on this case?” she shoots back. “None of the people who have seen the monster were sober at the time!”

“Technically, I only saw the hotel manager drinking _after_ he saw the monster. And what about the animal control officer? He was with me when we were attacked.”

“He didn’t bother to give a statement.”

Mulder crosses his arms. “And what about me? I saw it.”

She remembers the sheer terror at seeing him prone on the ground with blood on his face, how the fear had fallen away when he’d grinned and shown her his phone. For a minute, she’d thought she’d lost him before she had a chance to get him back. “Yeah, you did.”

“It’s a monster,” he repeats, petulant, stubborn.

Scully smiles in spite of herself. She’s missed him, more than she even realized. “That’s why I love you.”

He’s taken aback by the comment, ducking his head to hide his face. “You do?”

She swallows painfully. “Do you think I left because I didn’t?”

His mood has clearly dropped; he turns off the phone screen and pushes it to the side. “I kind of assumed so, yes.”

Scully shakes her head fiercely. “Mulder, no.” She touches his shoulder, but he won’t look at her. “I left because it was the only thing I could see to do,” she says softly. “But I never stopped loving you.” She’d missed him like air every night without him, the bed cold and empty, an unfamiliar apartment where the only ties to her old life were some old shirts, the wedding ring she keeps on her necklace, and a torn picture of their son. 

“Me, either,” he mumbles. 

She reaches forward, cups his cheek and kisses him. “I’ve missed you,” she says into his hair. 

He pulls her closer by two fistfuls of her shirt. “You, too,” he murmurs. They stay like that, wrapped around each other, for a long minute. 

“Scully,” he says finally. “You’re wearing my shirt.”

She smiles against his forehead. “Glad you finally noticed.” 


	13. toes

She wakes up when a small hand nudges her cheek. “Mommy?”

“William, what time is it?” she mutters into the pillows. 

“One-oh-six.” The bed shifts as William climbs on top. “Can I sleep with you and Daddy tonight? I had a nightmare.”

Scully opens an eye to stare at her son. He has a hold of Mulder’s old doll in one hand and a fistful of the blanket in the other, letting the cold air in, and an impressive cowlick in his dark hair. “Did it have anything to do with the stories Daddy was telling you today?”

William shrugs. “Maybe. But not all of them, just the one about the ghosts, cause you can’t see them.”

“Hmm.” Although she knows good and well that sleep tonight is going to be a foreign concept, she pulls William under the covers. “Why just the ghosts?”

“Cause you can see other monsters, Mommy. And you and Daddy would shoot them. But you can’t shoot ghosts cause they’re already dead.” 

William’s freezing toes scrape against her feet and she shudders. “What has your father been telling you?” she mutters, reaching down and grabbing his feet in an attempt to warm them up.

William giggles, wriggling. “Nothing too weird. He says you’re good at protecting people from visible empathies.”

“You mean entities?”

“Uh-huh. And I want to sleep with you because you’ll protect me cause you’re good at it. Even from invisible empathies.” 

Smiling, Scully draws her son into a hug. “That’s a good idea,” she says. “Although you know you can’t keep doing this. You’re almost in kindergarten, and you’ve got to be a big boy and sleep in your bed all night.” 

William pouts a little. She kisses his head, and says, “You can stay in here just for tonight, though. If Daddy says it’s okay.”

He grins, and his toes press against her hand as he rolls over and crawls towards Mulder. Scully smiles at Mulder’s startled yip, followed by, “Scully, clearly we need to stock up on socks. This kid’s toes are freezing.”


	14. woman, socks, locker, abandoned storage unit

Her first thought as she wakes up, prone and half-conscious on the ground is that she isn’t wearing shoes. Just socks, oversized white socks engulfing her small feet. They dangle from her toes as she pulls herself halfway off the dirty floor. 

Her second thought is about the small locker in the corner of the empty, overwhelmingly gray room. That she has to get to it. _11, 27, 73_ , she chants repetitively in her mind as she crawls towards it. _11, 27, 73._ She forces her numb and uncooperative fingers around the lock, to spin it accordingly. “11, 27, 73,” she mutters to herself, although she has no idea who told her those numbers or where they came from. Inside is a cell phone and a small slip of paper with a number written on it, messy and unfamiliar handwriting. Another number. She dials it and shoves the phone between her ear and shoulder, counts the rings as she breathes evenly. “Mulder,” says the person on the other end.

She flips the piece of paper over in her hand. “715 Redwood Way,” she reads. “Unit 617.”

“Wait,” the man on the other end says. “Waitwaitwait…”

She hangs up, lets the phone slip from her grasp and her head fall to rest on her arm. 

The fog clouding her mind lifts a little when she hears a crashing sound, and then a voice. “Scully?” 

She opens her eyes and blinks blearily up at him. “Scully,” he whispers again, in awe, and gathers her up in his arms, socks scraping the ground. “My God, I thought I’d never see you again.”

She wraps her arms around his neck, more automatically than out of necessity. “You have to help us,” she says.

“Of course, of course,” he mutters into her hair.

He doesn’t understand. She tugs at the man’s shirt impatiently. “They wanted us to find you. You have to help. They left us here for a reason.”

He pulls away, face lined with confusion. “Us?” he mutters. “Scully, what?”

She shakes her head to show him she doesn’t know who he’s talking about.

The man’s face falls. “Scully?” he whispers. She shakes her head again, and points towards the corner. He turns and sees the girl, much younger than her with dark hair curling down her back, dressed in the same hospital gown as her. No shoes, just socks.

He looks between them, eyes still wide with confusion. “Samantha?” he whispers.


	15. snowflakes

There is a light, and it is blinding her, turning her vision into a sterile white hospital haze. There is his hand in hers, and his scream frozen in the January air, mouth yanking open and a puff of icy steam, his fingers desperately curling over hers. There is a ship and it is hovering above them like a choking, dismal fog, like their unmoving breaths and words. 

There is a tug in her stomach, a pull upwards that threatens to yank her out of his reach and up, up, up.

The snowflakes fall backwards.


	16. future

It is forty-four even minutes to the airport, too uneven to be a steady amount of time; her hands shake on the wheel for thirty-three. “Are you nervous?” he asks. 

“Yes,” she says, and he takes her hand. 

Ahead of them, William appears in the slush of people from the airway: their son, wild dark hair, long legs and her eyes. He nods and waves awkwardly, mouths _Hi_ and smiles nervously as they go to meet him. 


	17. halloween & a skull sweatshirt

“So, what’re you supposed to be?” Frohike asks skeptically.

Scully can already feel herself turning red. She’s going to kill Mulder for his dumb pun later. “I’m me,” she says, plucking at the hem of the sweatshirt sheepishly. 

“Doesn’t count!” Langly yells somewhere from the inward of apartment.

“No, Scully, you’ve got to explain it the way I did,” Mulder says insistently, poking her arm. 

She is seriously going to kill him. She’d shown up at his house to find him in full-blown costume. She’d dressed casually and figured that was enough, but he’d shaken his head, insisting she had to go as something. He’d disappeared into his bedroom and come out with a bunched-up sweatshirt. “Here,” he’d said, handing it over.

She’d unwadded it and smoothed the wrinkles. “It’s festive, Mulder, but I don’t see how this qualifies as a costume.”

He’d smirked and explained it. She initially hadn’t agreed, but he’d prodded enough that it had seemed like a good idea back at the apartment. (Besides, it was warm and smelled like Mulder, which probably had something to do with the decision process. Not that she’d ever admit it, of course.)

Now Byers’s forehead is wrinkled with confusion. “I don’t get it,” he says. “You’re just wearing a sweatshirt with a skull on it…”

“I’m _me_ ,” Scully says more insistently, the back of her neck growing hot. “You know. Skull.” She jabs the emblem with one finger. “Scully.” 

It’s kind of like a flashback back to when she was nicknamed “Skull” in the second grade. She’s actually surprised no one made that joke earlier, what with her being a pathologist and working with Spooky Mulder. 

Frohike snorts. “Mulder come up with that one?” Byers says knowingly.

“Hey!” Mulder says, offended. “I happen to like that joke.”

Scully rises on her tiptoes and whispers in his ear: “Good thing you’re cute.”


	18. "Your son was just arrested."

“Your son was just arrested.”

“Very funny,” Scully says dryly, leaning down to kiss William on the cheek. “You’re hilarious, Mulder.”

“I put him up to it,” William says good-naturedly, hugging his mother from the side. “What’s the use of having a Fed mother if you can’t screw with her a little?”

“Just remember that I am, technically, a former Fed as well,” Mulder puts in cheerfully, headed upstairs with William’s duffel over his shoulder.


	19. She looks down at the paper in her hands.

She looks down at the paper in her hands. They’re treating him like he really is insane, making her sign a release paper that swears she is responsible for him. It seems ridiculous now, after she shot Pincus, the monster right inside his window, but hours ago she believed it; she bites her lip hard.

“You could always leave me here,” Mulder says, voice mournful with leftover resentment at her betrayal.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I wouldn’t do that, Mulder,” she says quickly, signing with an ink pen that leaves black smudges on the form; she pretends she didn’t leave him here because the guilt is still murky in her stomach. 

He doesn’t say anything, but lifts his indented wrist to brush her unmarked wrist gently with his hands: some kind of an answer, or a thank-you.


	20. "What do you say to that, Scully?"

“What do you say to that, Scully?” He’s nervous, clearly, from the way he’s pulling at his cuticles - nervous about asking her to move back in from a damn hospital bed after she’s driven cross-country to save his life and his son sits down the hall.

“Of course,” she says immediately. 

He’s surprised, staring at her with that same stricken awe he’d had the first time she’d kissed him. “Of course?”

Instead of answering, she pulls out her keys and shows him the one she’s had for nearly a decade now: the one with a strip of tape that reads _Home_ on it in Sharpie, in his handwriting.


	21. "I mean -- Gatsby didn't really love HER, the real Daisy; he was obsessed with her, which is a different thing entirely."

“I mean – Gatsby didn’t really love HER, the real Daisy; he was obsessed with her, which is a different thing entirely,” Scully notes, flipping through the thin paperback. 

“Obsessions can be all-consuming,” Mulder says - he knows that all too well.

“Yes, but Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy came from her representing everything he wanted out of life. For god’s sake, the book admits that he fell for her because of her house!” Scully snorts, tossing the book on his coffee table. She can feel Mulder’s eyes on her and thinks about him, obsessive in a completely different way. She covers his knee with one hand, and adds, “Don’t worry, Mulder, you’re nothing like Jay Gatsby.” 


	22. "Why did you lie to me?"

“Why did you lie to me?” 

“You’ve lied to me a thousand times,” she says, her voice tight and furious. “Do I not get some kind of pass here, or are you the only one who’s allowed to fuck up?”

“Not when it comes to your life,” he shoots back, because he can still feel the worry sitting heavily in the pit of his stomach, the fear of never seeing her again. 

“Fuck you; I did this for you, for answers, because I thought you’d be proud of me for taking a risk - I thought the cure to cancer would be worth it, that it would be something you’d understand.” The door slams behind her, something like nails on a coffin. 


	23. "Is that a birthmark, Scully?"

“Is that a birthmark, Scully?”

He regrets it as soon as he says it - he’s regretted almost everything he’s said since he came into this damn hospital room, the jealous slip-ups, the clumsy words.

“It’s a tattoo, Mulder - surely you’ve seen one,” says Scully, glaring at him as she yanks her sweater down where it had ridden up. 

He worries his lower lip between his teeth nervously, says, “I just didn’t take you for a tattoo person.”

Her gaze is chilly; she crosses her arms over her chest. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Mulder.”


	24. “We are required for this case to go for a horseback riding trip.“

“We are required for this case to go for a horseback riding trip.“ 

Scully raises an eyebrow. “How does that factor in?”

“Fastest way to get through the forest.”

She sighs: “At least horses don’t have a chance to break down; I can’t spend another cold night in the forest.”

“Don’t worry about that, Scully - I’m packing sleeping bags.”


	25. "Did you feel that?!"

“Did you feel that?!” Mulder’s cold hand presses into her bare shoulder.

Scully groans, blowing long strands of hair out of her face. “For the last time, Mulder, our brand new house is _not haunted_.”

“I’m serious, Scully, I really felt something,” he whispers frantically in her ear. 

She turns and buries her head in his shoulder, wrapping both arms around him and whispering, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”


	26. "Mommy? Mommy?"

“Mommy? Mommy??” 

“Emily?” she calls, turning in the shadowy hallways. 

Out of nowhere, William’s voice comes to join her: “Mommy, help!”

“I’m coming!” Scully shouts, pushing at the darkness, the shadows; they push back, holding her desperately in place. Her children are calling and she can’t find them, can’t help him; she screams their names until her voice goes hoarse.

She wakes up to an empty room, an empty bed, and buries her face in the pillows to muffle her sobs.


	27. "How could you even ask me that?"

“How could you even ask me that?”

“It’s a simple question, Scully,” he says softly, looking down at his shoes. 

“Mulder, how could you even think…” Her hand ghosts her abdomen, and the baby kicks; she thinks about all the lonely nights wrapped up in Mulder’s shirt and the blanket from the top of his couch when she couldn’t stop crying and missing him like air. 

“I just need to know… if it’s…”

“You’re the father, Mulder,” she whispers.


	28. "Shit, I forgot the eggs"

“Shit, I forgot the eggs.” The plastic bags crinkle in his arms as he kicks the door closed behind him. 

“Jesus, Mulder, when I said you could pick up some things at the store for me last night, I was _kidding,_ ”  Scully yawns at him over her coffee mug.

“Just trying to be a good boyfriend,” he says cheerily, setting the bags down on her counter.

“Boyfriend, huh; is that what you are?” she asks dryly, crossing her arms over her button-down shirt. 

“Something like that,” he declares, kissing her on the mouth; he tastes like coffee and toothpaste. 


	29. "Mulder? Help!"

“Mulder? Hellllp!” 

Her nightmares terrify him, startling him out of his own nightmare-cloaked sleep; he’d been reaching for her and she was gone and he couldn’t save her and Pfaster was always there at the edges. She had asked for space when they’d gotten to his apartment, stumbling into his bedroom in her ruined pajamas, and he is trying to give it to her, so he doesn’t move after the screams - if she is still asleep, it might not be good to wake her up, what is the protocol for nightmares? But she appears at the door a minute later, the Navajo blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulder and his Knicks shirt hanging down to her knees; she blinks wordlessly at him, fingers clenching the blanket, a silent plea.

He climbs to his feet and heads for the door - he doesn’t know if he should touch her, doesn’t know if she’ll flinch away, but she leans into him when he approaches, pressing her forehead into his shoulder. They climb into bed together wordlessly.


	30. "You're lucky that wasn't Bill."

“You’re lucky that wasn’t Bill.”  

It’s a few hours after Maggie’s funeral and Scully is sniffling behind her sleeves; her brother who has been estranged for almost thirty years now had showed up on her doorstep. Mulder has never met Charlie Scully before now, and is somewhat glad because apparently both of her brothers have a tendency to yell; Charlie had been shouting at her when Mulder had walked up and socked him in the jaw. 

“Bill would’ve punched you back,” Scully adds, pulling at the sleeves of her coat. 

Mulder loops an arm around her shoulder, drawing her into his side - she’s already been through so much today, the last thing she needs are asshole brothers who couldn’t even be bothered to come to the funeral. “For you, Scully, I’d take the punch,” he says. 


	31. Suddenly headlights wash through the windows of the empty bedroom.

Suddenly headlights wash through the windows of the empty bedroom. William lifts his head from his knees in the hall where he’s been curled into a ball to watch over his parent’s bodies. His cell phone lies dead beside him - everyone he’s called hasn’t picked up, maybe they’re all dead; so who is driving the car?

Minutes later, a knock comes at the door: “William Van de Kamp?” It’s a woman’s voice, and she sounds desperate, terrified, like she’s been crying. “Please, I need your help.”


	32. “Damn it Mulder, I said no.”

“Damn it Mulder, I said no.”

Skinner looks sorry, to his credit. If Mulder thinks he knows him, he suspects he is, wants to bend the rules; he’s always had a certain fondness, at least for Scully.

“I’m afraid Agent Scully will have to transfer to Utah and the X-Files will remain closed,” he says regretfully. “I might extend a friendly reminder that you’re still on probation for Dallas, and I wouldn’t push it.”

He reaches out to squeeze Mulder’s shoulder, but Mulder pulls away. He lets the door slam shut behind him.


	33. "Why the fuck you wear that?"

“Why the fuck you wear that?” 

Dana shoots a glare at Ellen, straightening her jacket: “I’m an _FBI agent_ , it’s _professional_.”

“A giant plaid red jacket?” says Ellen, rolling her eyes.

“I like it; that girl from college wore one, it was cute.”

“Speaking of cute, you’ll never get your _cute_ partner into bed this way.” Ellen waggles her eyebrows, and Dana throws a pillow at her head.


	34. “I don’t want to live another second without knowing what it feels like to kiss you.”

“I don’t want to live another second without knowing what it feels like to kiss you.”

He says it soft, like the people surrounding them can’t hear him, but of course they can because it’s all an act, a part of their cover story. Scully shivers and huddles closer to him; it’s what their persona requires. He cups her cheek and leans down, kisses her gently like the way she imagined he would’ve in that hallway. She kisses back desperate because she’s been waiting too damn long. 

When their cover is blown, she doesn’t let go of his hand.


	35. They locked eyes from across the room, each ready to act on the other’s signal.

They locked eyes from across the room, each ready to act on the other’s signal.Scully’s hand slipped under her jacket, feeling for her gun. The black-coated men flitted around the edges of the room, like crows - a flock, a murder for crows. She swallowed and grabbed her gun by the butt, nodded at him: Go.

Gunshots from all around. His mouth was still open on the sound of her name.


	36. irresistible

She shouldn’t be on a case. He’d offered to cover for her, call in sick if she didn’t want people to know she was still upset from the Pfaster ordeal. “I can’t let this stop me, Mulder,” she’d said. So they’re on a case. Disappearance of pets in the area, suspicion of it being a creature similar to Sasquatch. He doesn’t want her to be here, but is relieved he can be near her now. No risk of being kidnapped and almost murdered here.

He still has a hard time thinking of her as a potential victim on these cases. He’d only done it once, the second time they’d dealt with Tooms. They were supposed to stop the bad guys, not fall prey to them. Scully was so untouchable that it still startled him, even now after Duane Barry. He hated thinking about anyone hurting her. But now he can’t stop imagining her in every case they’d ever solved. Scully with a handprint carved into the skin above her liver, Scully handcuffed to a radiator, shot by Barnett, Scully bound and gagged in the trunk of a car ( _gone, gone like Samantha_ ), Scully with her hair and fingernails missing…

He shudders. He has to stop this.

The phone rings, and he answers it immediately. “Mulder.”

“Mulder,” Scully says, and stops. She sounds a little desperate. He hasn’t heard that tone in her voice since that first night. 

“Scully,” he says immediately. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” About a thousand different scenarios are going through his head, and none of them are pretty. 

“I had a - yes. I’m fine.” She sounds embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Mulder says, attempting to even his breathing. ( _answering machine blood on the windows car in the ditch mulder i need your help_ ) “Do you want me to come over there?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Of course not.”

He leaves his room quickly, and taps on the door next to his. Scully opens it, looking small with her hair rumpled around her face. She’s wearing sweats and his shirt that she took the night of the attack. “Come in,” she says, stepping aside. The room has all the lights on. 

Mulder steps in the room, reaching out to offer a comforting squeeze to her arm as he goes. “You okay?” he asks again.

“Mm hmm.” She sniffs suddenly, revealing the lie. 

_Oh, Scully_. She’s currently his best friend, and she’s trying not to cry in her hotel room. He wants to hug her again. He doesn’t move. “Scully, I’m so sorry.”

She wipes her eyes in one fierce motion. “Not your fault,” she says. The sleeves of the shirt fall over her hands. 

“It is. The only reason I took the damn case was because of the football game.” Thinking back on it, he wants to kick himself. He wanted to do something with her, something that would feel normal between them again. He ended up doing the exact opposite, bringing more trauma down on her. 

“Mulder, you could very well argue that it was my fault, for freaking out and heading to Washington, because he never would’ve gotten me alone otherwise,” she says. “It was no one’s fault. It happened, and I need to get past it.” She closes her eyes and rubs her forehead. 

“Did you tell your mother?” he asks softly.

“I didn’t want her to worry.”

“I thought she might be able to help you.”

Scully grimaces. 

“You could talk to me, if you wanted to,” he adds. _I wish I could make it all go away, Scully._

She covers her eyes. Her nails are cut short, unpolished. “I thought I was going to die, Mulder,” she says, voice shaking. “I woke up in that closet, and it wasn’t like Duane Barry because I didn’t know what he had planned to me. I had _seen_ what was going to happen to me, and I thought I was never going to see my mother, or sister, or-or you again…”

“I would’ve gotten there.”

“If I hadn’t been able to get away from him, you would’ve been too late.”

Mulder winces. “I couldn’t let myself imagine being too late,” he rasps. “Losing you… I had to keep telling myself that I’d get to you in time.”

She moves towards him, and he pulls her gently against him, burying his nose against her hair. “I just want to make the images stop,” she says against his shirt. “How do I make them stop, Mulder?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I wish I did.” He holds her as close as he can. “Have you bathed yet?” She’d mentioned having trouble before. 

“Mm hmm.” She pulls away to look at him. “Thank you for coming, Mulder.”

“Of course,” he says, smoothing her hair once before pulling away. “And you know you’re under no pressure to return that shirt,” he teases.

Scully smiles a little with embarrassment. “Could you turn on the TV, Mulder?” she says, turning to head for the bathroom. “I don’t like all the silence.”

Mulder flips on the TV, leaving it on the first channel that pops up. Football game - ironic. He leaves the remote by her bed so that she can change it if she wants to. Scully exits the bathroom, and rounds the side of the bed. “Want me to go?” he asks.

She nods, crossing her arms. “I’ve been getting better,” she says. “I just needed to calm down, but I’ll never be able to sleep alone if you don’t leave.”

“Okay.” He takes her by the elbows and presses a brief kiss to her forehead. “Call me if you need me, okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Good night,” he says, squeezing her elbow before moving past her and out of the room. 

Once, he’s outside of the room, Mulder leans his head against the wall of the hotel and attempts to even out his breathing. _She’s okay_ , he reminds himself. _She’s going to be okay_.


	37. post-modern prometheus

* * *

It’s late. The guard waves them out of the prison gates. Not for the first time tonight, Mulder wishes he could still be holding Scully, swaying underneath the lights, watched by about a million people. She hadn’t refused, which had surprised him. He’d felt bashful asking her. Like middle school all over again. But her beaming grin had been worth it. She’d been a lot more laid back lately. He can still hear her singing _Joy to the World_ , voice echoing off the trees of the Florida forest, feel her arms around him. The cancer changed them both, he thinks. Maybe for the better.

She’s yawning and staring up at him. “Mulder, I am exhausted,” she says in a sleepy-sweet voice.

Mulder drives. Scully dozes with her head lolling against the window. It’s almost 2 in the morning, and their flight is at 9 tomorrow. He hums _Walking in Memphis_ , which he knows will be in his head for the next month, at least. He flicks on the radio to some talk show. Someone makes a comment about “turkey day”.

“Shit,” Mulder says audibly. It’s Thanksgiving. 

Scully starts awake. “What is it?” she mutters.

“It’s Thanksgiving, Scully.”

She yawns, sitting up in her seat. “I know.”

“Why didn’t you take off, visit your family?” He remembers the months after Scully’s cancer went into remission - she’d spent most of them at home with her mother and brother hovering. He’d barely visited except on request, for fear of upsetting them. Surely they’d want to see her for Thanksgiving.

“I’m going down to California for Christmas,” she says. “I wanted to stay at work. I’ve missed it.” There’s the hint of a smile in her voice, and Mulder remembers her cool hand in his.

“But _Thanksgiving_ , Scully,” he says insistently. 

“Why didn’t you take off, Mulder?” Scully retorts stubbornly. 

He pauses, grips the wheel a little harder. The last Thanksgiving he’d been to was in 1973, less than a week before Samantha was taken. His father had been late, and his mother had left early to go lie down. They’d spent at least ten minutes at the table by themselves. Samantha had made faces at him across the table. He’d flicked mashed potatoes at her. He remembers the grown-up face of his sister in that diner - _maybe_ his sister, it still hasn’t been confirmed. She said she had kids of her own. They’re probably having a Thanksgiving dinner, maybe with the Smoker, the fucking bastard. “We don’t do Thanksgiving,” he says finally.

Scully is quiet for a minute before tapping the window with one finger. “Hey, Mulder, stop here,” she says.

“What - the all-night diner?”

“Thanksgiving dinner.”

They’re the only ones in the diner besides a lone cook. Mulder gets his food in under ten minutes. He makes a show of slicing his burger (”Hey, look, I’m carving the turkey!”), and categorizes the fries as mashed potatoes, dumping three little packs of strawberry jelly from the container by the window on a napkin and calling it the all-night diner’s answer to cranberry sauce. Scully doesn’t order anything, and yawns into her cup of tea. “You need some sleep, Scully,” he says.

She shakes her head stubbornly. “No,” she says. “I’m fine.” She smiles a little. “It’s… nice to be here.”

By _here_ , he doesn’t know if she means a diner in Indiana at 2:45 in the morning, or the earthly plane. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says.

“Me, too.” She reaches across the table for his plate. “Give me a piece of your fake turkey, Mulder.” She grimaces as she chews a small piece. “Ugh. Mayonnaise?”

“Hey, now, I don’t make fun of your rabbit food.”

“Hmm.” Scully grabs a fry and dunks it in the mound of jelly. “Did you all mix your potatoes and cranberry sauce?”

“Ugh,” he says, imitating her. “I don’t know how your family does Thanksgiving, Scully…” The sound of her laugh lifts something in his chest.

They leave at 3. Scully flips through radio stations as he drives them the short distance back to the hotel, humming along tunelessly under her breath. She settles on one as he parks, and gets out of the car, leaving the key in so she can keep listening if she wants. She opens the door and grabs his wrist. “Wait, I like this one,” she says.

They move together as she climbs out of the car, leaving the door wide open so that the music filters out, melding together in a slow-dance position. She sways rhythmically as she leans into him, a dance much more intimate than the first one. He thinks about kissing her. (Of course, he’s been thinking about kissing her for years now, and more definitively since her remission, but he’s seriously thinking about doing it, just tipping his head down so that their lips meet. He doesn’t think she’d push him away.)

She’s tired, head buried against his shoulder, but now she’s tipping her head up, and for a wild, brief second he thinks she might kiss _him_ -

\- but then she brushes her lips across his cheek, and he shivers as she pulls away and gives him a slow and drowsy smile. “Night, Mulder,” she says, slipping past him and heading to her room.

He watches her go, watches the door swing closed before turning off the car and heading to his own room. It’s okay. He has time to kiss her now, he thinks. The rest of their lives.


	38. genderbender

“Scully,” she answers crisply. The Voice of An FBI Agent. 

“Hey, Scully, it’s me,” Mulder says, yanking the pillows he’d propped up under his wounded leg out from under him. _Keep it propped up_ , she’d said sternly when she’d dropped him off, helping him to the couch. Two weeks later, and he is more than ready to stop propping up his leg. Besides, they have a case. “I just got a call about a case.”

A pause, and then her voice, curt. “Funny I didn’t hear anything. I’ve been in the office.”

_I need to work_ , she said after her father died. “You taken any cases?” he asks, bemused. He can’t imagine Scully chasing monsters alone with a flashlight. 

“No, just filling out paperwork,” she says. He knows she feels out of place in this assignment, but now he wonders if she is hurt that people still don’t regard her as part of the X Files, that people come to him first. That she may be Mrs. Spooky in the FBI, but in his world, she is a tag along. He wonders if he is just reading too much in to it and she is just upset about her father. “What’s the case?”

_I shouldn’t have led with the case_ , he thinks, recognizing the tension in her voice. “Are you doing okay, Scu- Dana? With - with everything?”

“You are about the sixth person to ask me that,” she says. “And you don’t have to call me Dana.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. God, he has the emotional range of a telephone pole.

“No, no, it’s-” she starts. “It’s fine. I’m just not used to it. I - I’m sorry, Mulder.” He pictures her sitting at his desk, eyes closed, hand massaging her forehead. “Are you sure you’re ready for active duty? How’s your leg?”

“It’s fine, doc,” Mulder says as he stands, wincing a little. “Hurts some, but I’ll be fine.”

“Mulder, what if you get hurt again?” Her voice cracks a little. He wonders if she feels guilty. 

“It wasn’t your fault, Scully,” he says. “It’s time for me to work again, and I know you’ll have my back.”

“Thank you, Mulder,” she says. “Although I’m not sure about you returning to duty yet.”  She sounds worried, her hospital-bedside driving-home-a-wounded-partner-from-North-Carolina voice. 

“I’ll be fine, Scully, really,” he says. “It’s convenient having a doctor as your partner besides that - you can check on me if there’s a problem.” 

Scully sighs. It’s a sigh of defeat, but a sigh of some slight amusement as well. “Tell me about the case,” she says. 

Mulder smiles. “Mysterious death after a sexual encounter,” he says. 

“What’s the address? I’ll meet you at the scene.”

Mulder relays it as he slides his gun into his holster. “Here we go again,” Scully says.

“You and me, Scully,” he says. She laughs softly into the phone.


	39. skinner is annoyed by mulder and scully

He likes Mulder and Scully. He does. They’re definitely the more entertaining of all the agents under him. All of the other problems he has with agents are disputes with reports, breaking protocol. Simple fixes, lecture-and-done. Not wrestling with them in a Bureau hallway. Not holding someone/being held at gunpoint in a not-dead man’s apartment. It’s almost amusing at times, the antics the agents unintentionally entangle him in. Other times, it’s headache-inducing.

The stench of nicotine never quite leaves his office, some reminder of the choice he’s made.

There’s some conscious moment where he changes sides. If he was ever on the smoker’s side in the first place. There’s something in Agent Mulder’s eyes, the lift of his chin, that make his theories believable. There is something to them, solid and real. Agent Scully doesn’t back him up on half of his theories, but she still has his back in everything. She pointed a gun at her superior officer, something that doesn’t seem like normal behavior for her. He likes their partnership, admires it even. They’re irritating as hell, but together, they’re an unstoppable force. He respects that.

So why the hell are they arguing and why the hell is he supposed to listen to it?

“For the last time, Mulder,” Agent Scully is saying. “You don’t know what you saw! You were hallucinating, and it was pitch black out there!” They’ve been shouting at each other for about seven straight minutes, and Skinner has a headache.

“I was _not_ hallucinating,” Agent Mulder snaps. “I know what I saw, Scully! It was a werewolf.”

“Werewolves don’t exist!”

Skinner sighs, looking down at the reports on his desk. He’s starting to wish he’d never called them up to figure out the report disputes. Or to explain why there were two reports in the first place. Better to leave this stuff undisputed and unexplained. It’s the goddamn X-Files for a reason.

“I’m not even getting started on that claim,” says Mulder, sounding like he’s at the end of his rope. “You did the autopsies, you should-”

“The autopsies implicated the Jenkins’ dog.”

“Oh, _please_ , this isn’t a Stephen King novel.”

“Mulder, _all_ of your theories are Stephen King novels.”

Skinner sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Agents…”

“You were _in_ that basement, Scully, you saw him change forms!” Mulder insists.

“I saw a very sick man writhing around on the floor. And when I turned around to call 9-1-1, I conveniently missed your ‘transformation’." Agent Scully puts finger quotes around the word transformation. Her face is bright red; Skinner can’t remember the last time he saw her this mad. 

"Agents…” he tries again, louder. 

“Oh, and you _always_ turn around at the most convenient times. Right when there’s something important to see.”

Skinner rubs his forehead wearily. _Why me_ , he thinks briefly.

“And isn’t it convenient that these ‘ _miraculous’_ things I keep missing happen right around the time I turn around? Coincidence, Mulder?” she drawls, sarcastic and fierce. 

"After _all_ you’ve seen, Scully…” Mulder is placating, and Scully is in mid-eyeroll, ready snap out a retort.

“Agents!” Skinner barks. 

Mulder and Scully are stunned into silence, turning to face him. Skinner takes a deep breath, an attempt at composure, rubbing his temple with his forefingers again. “Have there been any other deaths in the area?” he asks at length.

Mulder blinks. “I… no, sir,” Scully says. 

“Then consider the matter closed, _please_. The conflicting reports don’t matter. It’s not like anything in the X-Files is easily explained anyway,” he grumbles, tenting his fingers on top of Agent Scully’s report. (It’s about a page long, as opposed to Mulder’s five-page musing on the nature of transformations.)

"Sir, if I could…” Mulder tries. Skinner fixes him with a glare, and his mouth snaps shut. 

“File both the reports,” he says firmly. “It’s fine. And for the love of God, stop arguing.”

They both look stunned. “Yes, sir,” says Scully finally. 

“Good.” Skinner adjusts his glasses and thanks his blood pressure for staying down. “Dismissed.”

Mulder casts a wary look at Scully before they get to their feet and trudge out of the office. Their bickering starts up again, quieter this time, before the door’s even shut. 

Skinner sighs, stacking the reports and setting them aside. The X-Files unit is exhausting. Why should he be in charge of this ridiculous unit? It’s a good thing he likes Scully and Mulder, or else the unit probably would be shut down. He likes Agents Mulder and Agent Scully, he really does. Respects them. Admires them. But he is only human and there is no reason he should have to listen to arguments over… over… over ridiculous things that don’t actually exist. For _fuck’s_ sake.

“Goddamn werewolves,” he mutters, head in his hands.


	40. pilot scully

When she finds the bumps, she isn’t thinking about the case.

She _was_ thinking about the case, right up until the power went out - she’s a professional, after all - but it’d seemed a little futile to be thinking about it in the dark. She’d figured now was a good a time as any to take a shower. By the time she entered the bathroom with her flickery candle, her mind had turned to a hundred other things - the girls weekend she and Ellen and Kathy have planned a month from now, her brother flying in for Easter, whether or not she can convince Mulder to partake of that salmon he went on and on about tomorrow. And then her fingers brush over the small of her back and find the bumps.

She dismisses it for a split second before she remembers the slide show Mulder presented days ago. The flashing pictures of raised bumps on the backs of corpses. On Karen Swenson and Peggy O’Dell. She begins twisting to try and face the mirror to compare the marks, but the bad lighting and inability to bend that way only increase her panic. She collapses on the closed toilet seat, head spinning, mind racing.

_It could be an animal bite,_ she starts to rationalize, as is her habit. _Or some kind of rash, you were in the woods all night…_ But the small of her back was unlikely to be exposed to anything that would cause this. Her next thought is that the marks are the result of a virus, something that would explain the death of Karen Swenson and those other kids. But the autopsy showed no explainable cause of death. No plausible explanation for these marks…

She doesn’t believe in aliens and she doesn’t believe these kids were abducted by them. There _has_ to be some kind of plausible explanation for it all. Scully thinks back on the case, finally landing on the protein-like thing Mulder had asked her to identify. Maybe the bumps are a reaction to exposure to that chemical, maybe she was exposed at some point. But she’s worn gloves, been careful, can’t think of a time when such exposure would be possible… unless it happened during her chunk of missing time.

Scully shivers, scooping her robe up off of the floor and wrapping it around her. “Time can’t just disappear,” she firmly reminds herself in the empty room, echoing her words from earlier. _It’s a universal invariant._ But something did happen in that car, some kind of… blackout or something. But still, there was no way they were abducted during that time… isn’t there? And the only person who had access to her during this time was Mulder.

It’s a possibility, she supposes, that Mulder could be setting her up, trying to convince her of his insane claims by manipulating her somehow, that he could’ve caused these bumps, but she highly doubts that this is the case. She is here to debunk him, but his behavior towards her these past few days is not suggestive of him doing anything like that to solidify his ideas, to give him credit. He’s passionate, sure, frustrating, sure, but not malicious, she doesn’t think. Besides, he clearly doesn’t care about his reputation (if he’s going to call _himself the FBI’s most unwanted_ , he must be), so the only person he’d be trying to convince by causing these marks is her. She’s not sure why she feels this way, but some small part of her unconsciously trusts him. He’s given her little reason not to - and they are, after all, partners. 

So what does that leave?

She doesn’t believe in aliens. But something is killing these kids, leaving a mammalian creature with an implant up its nose in Ray Soames’ grave. Something is causing these marks. 

_I think those kids have been abducted,_ Mulder had said.  _Abductees… people who have made UFO sightings, they’ve reported unexplained time loss,_ Mulder had said. _It’s absolutely ridiculous, there is no way they’ve been abducted by aliens,_ Scully thinks. But the signs are all there. Some iota of evidence, insane or no.

She’s thinking crazy, she tries to move her mind away from that, dismiss the marks, but she finds she can’t. Her legs won’t stop trembling when she gets up to turn off the shower. She’s shaken, that’s for sure, and she doesn’t see herself calming down at any point in the foreseeable future. There seems to be only one solution to put her mind at rest. She’s at Mulder’s door within five minutes.

He opens the door, candle in hand, and says, “Hi,” with some kind of gentle surprise. She trusts him, she does, and she kind of hates him and herself for it. If he were some suspicious, awful person, she could dismiss the marks as a result of his manipulation. Safe, scientific explanation. Staying with her priorities. Nope, no problem here.

“I want you to look at something,” she says, hating the way her voice trembles like a reed in the wind. 

“Come on in,” Mulder says immediately. 

He steps aside and she enters. She realizes in the moment that she didn’t consider changing into actual clothes, a shirt that she could easily lift up and show him. Mentally berating herself, she doesn’t bother to turn around or explain, just slips the robe from her arms down past her waist so that the marks are visible in the candlelight. Better to get this done so she can sneak back to her room and drown herself in her embarrassment and/or panic. She looks back at him, where he’s looking at her questioningly. _This isn’t a come-on_ , she thinks with frustration, motioning towards her back with her chin. He kneels obediently to take a look. “What are they?” she asks, trying to make her voice stop shaking.

His fingers find her spine, gently, and she shivers from the contact. They are warm, imprinting themselves on her skin. The flame flickers. “Mulder, what are they?” she demands, panic rising.

Mulder grins with ease - not a cruel grin, a genuine smile. “Mosquito bites.”

“Are you sure?” she practically stammers, somewhere between relieved and furious at him for making her panic. Her pulse is racing. 

“Yeah. I got eaten up a lot myself out there,” he says, some attempt at comfort.

Scully breathes out in relief, pulling her robe back up. She turns towards Mulder and into his arms, leaning hard against him.

His arms come up around her gingerly, clearly surprised. This is way past Bureau protocol and they’ve known each other for approximately three days. She’s somewhere between furious and ashamed of herself for behaving this way. “You okay?” Mulder asks softly, nose turning slightly into her hair.

The candle light flickers outside her vision. She wasn’t abducted because aliens don’t exist. Whatever happened to those kids didn’t happen to her. Mosquito bites. “Yes,” she says softly. _I’m just fine._


	41. "Jackson?"

The boy nodded, his face as nervous as Scully’s churning stomach. “It’s my middle name, really,” he said. “Mom and Dad changed my middle name when they adopted me, William Jackson, and there were two other Williams in my class so I wanted to go by Jackson… is that okay?”

Scully smiled; despite the knot in her stomach when she’d heard her son, her baby who she’d named after their fathers introduce himself as Jackson, in the moment it didn’t seem important: as long as he was alright. “Of course it is,” she said.


	42. “She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out, just empty hollow silence”

Mulder lay on the floor inches away from her, his mouth half-open, gasping on air. His mouth formed the first syllable of her name, soundlessly. Near them, the feet of strangers pounded the carpeted floor, every footfall reverberating through her body like nails on a coffin.

Scully struggled to move, shifting from side to side, but found herself unable to shift much more than her hand. She slid it across the floor, matching palms with Mulder, and curled her fingers tightly around his as darkness fell down like the curtain at the end of a play.


	43. Mulder was shocked when a man answered Scully's door practically naked.

The man took a toothbrush out of his mouth and said, “You’re the partner, right? Dana’s in the back, she said you might be coming; c’mon in.”

Mulder entered as the stranger wandered back into the bathroom, and found Scully putting on earrings at the kitchen table. “Oh, Mulder,” she said abruptly, “thanks for coming to pick me up. That was Ethan Minette, by the way, he’s my…”

“Does your boyfriend always answer the door in his boxers, Scully?” Mulder asked, and she made a part-exasperated, part-playful look in return. 


	44. "Okay, that was pretty funny wasn't it?"

“It was  _Caddyshack_ , Mulder,” she said with some disdain.

“Oh, come on, Scully. It was just the right kind of lighthearted to take your mind off of disappearing off the face of the earth this afternoon, right?” he said, putting his arm around her. 

“I did not go anywhere, Mulder; I can assure you I stayed very grounded on this earthly plane.” But she was smiling as she said it, snuggling into his side.


	45. "You're sure it's not twins in there?"

She smiled behind her hand, loving the feeling of his hand on her abdomen. “It’s not twins, Mulder; I had a sonogram a few months ago.”

He was staring at her abdomen with a wide-eyed fascination, hand curling around the baby’s foot; she smiled, smoothing a hand over his hair tenderly, and he rested his cheek on her stomach. “I can’t believe this, Scully,” he said softly into the soft cotton of her t-shirt. “I can’t believe we did this.”


	46. "The baby kicked the soap right off my belly"

Scully pouts at him underneath the wet locks of hair hanging in her face, the baby’s head on her chest, cupped under her wet hand. Mulder chuckles a little, kneeling beside the tub. “Did I mention that this kid has an aptitude for soccer, Scully?” 

“It is impossible to find soap in bath water,” she says in the sleepy, half-pouty voice that she’d taken on when she is indescribably happy, her hands never leaving the baby.

Mulder smiles, unable to help himself, and kisses her forehead before searching for the soap.


	47. "i haven't been to a planetarium since i was eleven, mulder."

“Come on, Scully, it’s romantic.” 

She can barely see his shit-eating grin under the pinpoints of light on the vast dark ceiling. His voice is light and innocent, but he’s teasing her, he has to be, they’re crowded in among bored kids on field trips and tourists with cameras around their necks. “And why is that?” she says skeptically.

He takes her hand, squeezes it. “Look up; we’re under the stars.”


	48. "You really felt the need to do THAT in front of my brother?"

Samantha is full-on glaring at the kid she’s been dating who’s name Scully can’t remember (Ethan? Emmett? Something), hands on her hips, Mulder has a combination of amusement and brotherly over-protectiveness shifting across his face, and Scully is trying to hide laughter behind her hand (she remembers similar scenes with Bill, when they were a lot younger).

“You said they wouldn’t be in for a while because they lived so far away,” the kid protests, face red, “and how was I supposed to know that he’d be right behind the door?”

“It’s  _Thanksgiving_ , I  _told_  you family would be coming in today, what did you expect…”

Mulder clears his throat awkwardly, ventures, “So you’re the boyfriend?” and Samantha turns on him with a vengeance that only a little sister can have.

“Come on, Mulder, give the kids some privacy,” says Scully, tugging on his wrist; they might all be older now, but she can remember being young and in love and being scrutinized by her older brother–what can she say, she sympathizes with her sister-in-law.


End file.
